1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a vibration correction control circuit for correcting a displacement of the optical axis caused by vibration such as camera shake, and an image pickup apparatus that includes said vibration correction control circuit.
2. Description of the Related Art
Digital still cameras and digital movie cameras (hereinafter generically referred to as “digital cameras”) have been widely used by general users. Various methods for correcting camera shake are proposed for users who are not familiar with how to handle the cameras properly and therefore are likely to encounter camera shake when taking pictures. Among those digital cameras available, there is one, mounted on a mobile phone, which serves as one of functions in the mobile telephone and a certain type of them are so designed that the camera is held by one hand only. In such devices operated by a thumb in one hand, the shake is more likely to occur as compared with commonly used cameras held by two hands to take pictures.
An electronic method and an optical method are available to correct such a shake. An typical example of the optical shake correction is a lens-shift method. In the lens-shift method, the optical axis is corrected as follows. That is, the lens position is moved in such a direction as to cancel out the displacement caused by the vibration applied to a camera. The lens-shift method requires a vibration detecting element, such as a gyro sensor, for detecting the vibration applied to the camera and a position detecting element, such as a hall element, for detecting the lens position.
In a conventionally known technique, the shake is corrected by moving the entire image pickup unit on which the lens, the image pickup devices and the vibration detecting element are mounted. This method requires no position detecting element, so that a control system can be simplified.
Electronic equipment, such as digital cameras, which contains LSIs mounted therein needs to be subjected to operation verification before they are shipped out of a manufacturing site. Similarly, an image pickup apparatus also needs to be subjected to operation verification wherein the image pickup apparatus includes the aforementioned vibration detecting element, a driver element for adjusting the position of the aforementioned image pickup unit, and a vibration correction control circuit for generating a drive signal, used to drive the driver element, from a vibration component detected by the vibration detecting element.